Unnamed sources told Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross of the Chron that UC President Robert Dynes was asked to resign.

Dynes announced his resignation Monday and stated that he will stay on as president no later than June 2008. Wyatt Hume, provost of the UC, will take over as chief operating officer during the search for a new president.

Sources speaking to the Chron said that UC Regents Chairman Richard Blum met with Dynes three weeks ago in Emeryville and told him that the Regents were getting restless with Dynes’ ability to run UC.

Of course Blum really isn’t talking.

“I know you have a job to do,” Blum told The Chronicle, “but the answer to everything else is going to be, ‘No comment.’ “

If the Chron is right, then the Regents must have been fed up with all the controversies that occurred under Dynes’ reign as president. And maybe the Regents knew that they were going to ask for Dynes’ resignation last May, and maybe that’s why they just gave Dynes a slap on the wrist. Obviously, this is all speculation.

And then, of course, this may also end this whole scientists-leading-the-largest-university-in-the-world thing.

One state official familiar with the meeting said several regents had concluded that after nearly four years on the job, Dynes, a former physicist and UC San Diego chancellor, was in over his head at the top of the 10-campus system.

“But then, what do you expect?” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Spending 17 years in laboratories doesn’t exactly set you up for running what is, in effect, a multibillion-dollar corporation.”